5:42 Hey, that's me! :-D Yeah, there's still pads for an ADB port and supporting SMD components on the Trayloader board, along with some other leftover legacy I/O (there's a floppy header left unpopulated, which if you solder it in, actually works under earlier versions of Mac OS 8). That said, it's right behind one of the screwposts for attaching the side panel, which is outside of the actual I/O port opening, so to get around that I had to jankily solder a MiniDIN-4 port to it by wires. It's very ugly, and I don't show it in the pictures for that reason, but it's what I had to do to be able to claim the first NT4 on an iMac G3 install :-P
No joke...I thought they must have collaborated at first but nope...but anyway....if you both watch both channels too, you are both my brothers...I hope you are both doing well! I hope you are both having a great day or night!! Don't do anything I wouldn't do My Brother's!!
@bent-jl6rc I do, and I love both of their content. I mainly watch gamers playing inde games and pc channels like this. We are probably alot more similar than we realize. Have a good night brother. God bless!
Funfact: Rewritable CDs don't use dyes. They use a Phase-Change Material. It works by heating up the Material to around 700°C and when it cools down, it loses its Cristalline Structure and its reflectivity. For deleting the laser heats it up to around 200°C, it returns to its cristalline Structure and becomes reflective again. P
the text at 0:57 says "ok buddy, I know the Imac G3 isn't a "PowerMac", but I'm just using the term "PowerMac" as shorthand for "PowerPc Mac" so please chill with the semantics"
@@SunnyRayPL Unless if it's some other reason, I think he should. The only way to run Windows on Wii is either DOSBOX (slow as hell on Windows 3.1) or from Linux (QEMU, however there are barely any videos of it plus it's an emulator, not native)
@@afan64 it's an absolutely cursed port running in the wrong endianness with things broken -- the reason I scrapped the port for now is because I also got weird issues with GPU memory corruption on real hardware, and a powerpc mac laptop was cheaper than a usb gecko.
@@betaswithWack0 thats funny, where i live the powerpc mac laptop is WAY more expensive than 60 USD, too many collectors maybe? Everything under 100 USD is marked "missing parts" "no cord/battery" or "*for parts only*"
@@SysOpQueen I got two very lucky auction deals: an iBook G3 Snow on Yahoo Auctions Japan with charger, and a Lombard on eBay with charger, both being sold "for parts only" because of purely software issues. (ok so the lombard has a bad hinge and a line running down the screen, i don't care about that for a dev system)
Currently watching and just paused the video right the moment you succeeded formatting the HDD. Funfact about the Win NT 4.0 Setup: While technically being able to use an 8GB partition to install to (the last sector of that partition has to be within the first 1024 cylinders of the disks geometry), you can only do so by formatting the partition outside of the setup routine with an already running Windows NT system. Because the Windows NT Setup will actually format the partition as FAT16 and therefore is limited to 4GB (because WinNT can actually use a cluster size twice as big as DOS or Win9x). After the first reboot and booting from the hard disk to finish the setup - if you chose to format as NTFS - it will then convert the disk to NTFS. However, partitions originally formatted as NTFS will perform better, than partitions that got converted from FAT to NTFS.
@StringerNews1 "I also got in the habit of making a small FAT boot partition for NT, not unlike the current-day EFI partition, or what NetWare did." Yes... Actually Intel took the way Microsoft did with their ARC firmware when they designed the first EFI specification, and then was inherited to the open TianoCore/UEFI we have nowadays. And not only that... If we see the similarities and differences, we can tell EFI is just the continuation Microsoft and IBM had done in the RISC space with the ARC specification. Even IBM had a shell firmware in their NT PPC machines resembling DOS, just as today UEFI does.
One of the things PReP/CHRP systems such as the RS/6000 and PowerStack had in common was, unlike most Macs that were filled with ASICs, they used mostly standard chips, specifically the Motorola MPC10x memory controller/PCI bus generator (aka "Grackle"). This chip family was also used in the beige G3, Wallstreet, B&W G3/Yikes! G4, Lombard, and the first few iMacs. The Heathrow multi-function ASIC (ATA, floppy, SCSI, ethernet, etc) was also used in many of these computers (the Wallstreet actually uses two to enable the dual drive bay function), along with its successor Paddington, and they probably didn't have functional drivers for them before now. A fun project, but don't hold out hope you'll see NT running on anything newer (iBooks, Pismo or later, any non-PCI G4, FW iMacs or later) or older systems without a lot of writing drivers for the ASICs (same with onboard sound, though maybe an NT-compatible PCI sound card will work?). I may have to try this on a beige G3. Odd that the github page says it doesn't work out of the box, since the Gossamer board in the beige G3s was the closest to CHRP-compliant hardware that Apple ever built.
It says it doesn't work on a Beige G3 at the moment because they don't have New World firmware, which is needed to boot. Without it, they need a custom bootloader. Remember that Linux and BeOS used to start loading Mac OS and then sideload the OS on older Macs.
@@phipli That's true, but they still have OpenFirmware so there should be a way to get it to load. Maybe the OF version is too old for the commands they're running in the current version of the ARC boot loader, or the method to invoke it on OldWorld Macs is non-standard; may need to take inspiration from XPostFacto here. It's possible a later version of the ROM would work OOTB but early revisions may not. I'll play around with it. A beige G3 is really better suited for NT especially since USB is unlikely to ever work properly under NT4 SP2 (it was never officially built into NT4 at any point (see MS KB 196661) which is probably why the USB implementation they tried to use here didn't work). If the floppy drive could be made to work that'd be even better. I'd rather bootstrap from a floppy than a CD, especially since the Mac won't ignore a floppy like it may a CD.
@@fsfs555 Interestingly enough, there WAS some kind of USB implementation for NT4, the SGI320 had one (mostly a backport from win2000) for supporting USB keyboards. I also wrote high-level USB drivers for USB keyboards/mice and mass storage under NT4, which was done when I was porting to the Wii, it's just the low level stuff really that needs to be done, and given that the USB stack in the ARC firmware doesn't work currently, that would need to be fixed first.
@@fsfs555 The floppy drive in a Beige is unlikely to work with NT - Mac floppy drives are very different to PC ones, although the Beige G3 actually was designed to work with both types. The unpopulated PC style floppy connector is partially under the Mac floppy connector on the board. OpenFirmware on beige macs isn't a very tidy implementation - it is sort of the bare minimum to get running and nothing more. On my 6500, if I touch delete it crashes for example. I think... The grackle is an older model compared to the B&W? I haven't gone looking, but I remember there being a part number change to support the 100MHz bus. It would be great if someone sorted a bootloader and tweaked the drivers for support though! I have a Beige G3 set up on the other side of the room right now :) a later model with the Rage II Pro Turbo video chip.
I went through an introductory phase of snagging these older Macs from my dump/transfer station. Most all booted up, many had previous owners info on them. I’d wipe them and bring up to the most current operating system. Mess around with them then give away or bring back to the electronics trailer. Then I bought my first G5 iMac.
that emulation software might actually be ground breaking i think that with some minimal modding you might be able to run half life on there, maybe if it was possible to offuscate the sp version and make it report sp3 might not work at all, but who knows
Great video! I've honestly wondered for a long time if this might be possible. As you mentioned, the type of dye does make a big difference with older machines reading CD-Rs. I've had the best luck with discs that use cyanine dye, which some companies (notably CMC) still make but have become relatively rare today. Also, the developer... I recognize the name "Wack0". This is the same person who was behind the infamous Nintendo data leak among others. I also used to know this person, long before anything like that happened.
@@vardekpetrovic9716 No, the name of one of the chapters in this video is "service pack situation is crazy" which is a reference to a meme about internet drama. I thought it was a funny joke.
Even on x86 systems, you generally want to install NT to a partition no larger than 4 GB, because even when specifying NTFS, it starts out as FAT16 and then converts to NTFS. Workarounds exist to go even higher, but it would likely introduce even more potential problems. Once installed, the remainder of the drive can generally be used as an extended partition, though it may require certain service packs to do so (i.e. SP4 or higher on IDE drives while SCSI drives might get by on SP1.)
What I do, is make a small partition, just like in own modern UEFI machines, in the first 4GBs and just for the loader part. And the rest of the system is installed in a bigger NTFS formatted partition. These days you can get bootdisks can format to the older NT4 NTFS.
This is pretty dang cool. New World Macs (which use Open Firmware and place the Macintosh Toolbox in RAM) are partially compatible with CHRP, which is itself partially compatible with PReP. That's the PPC hardware standard that NT4 supported. So I'm guessing that this project has filled in the various gaps where New World differs from PReP.
NT actually was compatible and running fine in CHRPs, just not Macintoshes (as SteveJobs shutdown the project, along with the 3rd party cloners and several other things). The Canon/Firepower Powerized series (you can see in the textmode setup list in the video) are complete CHRP machines with OpenFirmware as the boot firmware on them, but instead the Apple sauce bit chips SWIM/PMZ/ADB, them had standard Serial/Parallel/PS2 outputs, a standard PC-style floppy controller and a normal VIA/CUDA chip. Microsoft and Firepower had the code and drivers for the Apple chips ready, but it never came to be.
This is incredible, and it opens doors to cool things, I see a kernel extender in a few years that increases compatibility to Windows XP levels, as well as improvements to the NTVDM emulator that is used in this version, it will only be a matter of time before see cool things appear.
Dammit Michael! I was trying to be the first one! 🤣 I have like two hours of disaster videos filmed and I still haven’t gotten it to freaking work I’ve been working on it since Monday night 😂
20:20 Funny coincidence, I was picking a file to upload around this time and Firefox seemed to freeze, but I could still hear you being all "Did it hang here? I can still move the mouse"
33:20 - Thought people might want to know how it's running Doom II - a 32-bit application: it's because x86 versions of the NTVDM simply used the CPUs Virtual 8086 mode, which guaranteed you 8086-level compatibility and nothing more. However, non-x86 NTVDMs had to do full system emulation, so throwing in 386 protected mode support was a cakewalk after writing reams of code to emulate everything from x86 real mode to VGA. An interesting experiment (if you hacked at the NTVDM to replace its DOS 5.0-like kernel) would be to try to install Windows 95 inside it.
This just proves that even back in 1999, Apple only cared about being proprietary. They could've used the PowerPC standard, but they didn't. I'm still impressed at how much life these old Macs have been given in the last decade.
It's worse than you think. Apple was a major contributor to the standard PPC platform, CHRP. But they only partially implemented it in their own products. Apple did finally embrace the concept of a consistent platform in 1999 with the iBook G3, but it was still their own.
@@JustinTire I'm usually very anti-apple but I see the appeal They can manufacture their own stuff and do it their own way, theoretically allowing for significantly higher performance and/or efficiency
@@JustinTire A lot of articles I've read, and videos I've watched say that the M-series chips perform better than the Intel chips in benchmark tests. I personally feel that the gripe most people have with Apple moving to proprietary silicon is that a lot of applications and many operating systems aren't compatible anymore. Now, I don't know how macOS applications are packaged or distributed, but there are bound to be compatibility issues with certain things when you switch over architectures. You have to take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, of course. I've only read some articles and watched some TH-cam videos, so I don't have all the answers, and I'm probably going to be wrong with a few things. This is just my input on the issue.
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL was the bane of my existence back in the NT4 days. Even on supposedly 100% compatible x86 hardware. Fun times trying to learn programming when every once in a while the computer would bluescreen. But such were the times, we didn't even expect things to actually work.
SP3 is required for Half Life because SP3 is the service pack that adds DirectX to NT4. Half-Life needs DirectX. You can not hack around this limitation. Quake 2 does not require DirectX and would probably work very slowly in this configuration. There will be few other commercial games that would work. DirectX was just so much faster than not using it, there became a point where no one supported a non DirectX fallback anymore.
33:23 You mixed up some stuff here. You can run 16-bit and 32-bit DOS extended applications in emulation. DOOM 1 and 2 are 32-bit applications. You can also run 16-bit _Windows_ mode applications, but not 32-bit Windows mode applications. i.e. DOOM will run, but Doom 95 will not.
Michael MJD, Also the burned CD that is liter color is a thinner layer, I found that a lot of times, not all ways but alot of times if you put a CD LABEL on the disc it reads.
When I was a kid every single computer magazine failed me by never saying what “Windows NT” stood for…so judging by the box art I assumed it was “Windows Night Time” since it had stars on the box.
I put windows 10, natively, on my 2012 MacBook Pro as it won’t update the Apple stuff anymore. It runs perfectly. Use it a lot. I love stuff like this, thanks!
Okay, so, thanks for the video. Lots of neat tricks and hints to get this running and good support from other fans of this. Personally, I never saw the draw of installing Windows SW on Apple HW. Apple SW on PC HW - that’s a different story. Each to their own. Thank you for your video.
The mouse hold-dragging thing still works on modern computers. It's a legacy that were left from both Microsoft and Apple GUI. And I personally find hold dragging to be more comfortable to use.
I was thinking about this, because I do like playing with older macs and older OSes, and heard there was a PPC version of Windows NT. Awesome to see the community has made it work on these PPC macs.
I have a smaller keyboard... but I didn't want it too small. I cannot do without full-size cursor keys AND home/end plus page-up/page-down. Holy keys for keyboard navigation commands.
My understanding is that the issue with burned CDs on earlier drives is a result of CD-R and CD-RW media having a smaller difference between the reflectivity of the pits and lands. Basically the "burned" parts of a CD-R that were supposed to imitate pits were more reflective than actual pits on a stamped disc, so depending on how an older CD-ROM drive is calibrated it might not be able to read it (And of course different layer dyes affected this as well). Sometimes the drive/device had a potentiometer on it's logic board which controlled the edge voltage coming from the photodiode used to decode the pits and lands, this could sometimes be adjusted to allow the device to read other media. The speed you burn a disc also has zero effect on this. The common advice to use lower speeds is from the advice surrounding making sure the burn is successful, as early on systems might have trouble keeping the write buffer full- if it emptied out then the burn would fail, and of course slower speeds meant that the system had to do less work to keep it full and thus more likely to have a successful burn.
Oh, unreadable Verbatim discs in old systems. I remember how I'm bought an around 10 quite expensive Verbatim DVD-R discs in jewel box each back than, burn some PS2 backups on them and couldn't read any of them afterwards. Fun fact that after I tossed all of them and bought literally the cheapest random no-name DVD-R discs from local random shop, burned images again and they still work after so much years. :')
IRQL error is usually a bad driver. It should have written something more specific to a logfile. Or in this case, a lolfile. My G4 had a DVD-RAM drive, it too can only read Select Disks, and cannot read burned or DVD disks, of any dye, and is limited to 2.4GB. Replaced with a normal DVD drive to stop the swearing.
NT 4 was a strange beast. IIRC, before SP 4, you couldn't create a partition during setup that was larger than 2GB because... it formatting it initially as FAT16 and then automatically converted it to NTFS near the end of setup.....
Ohhh run the full dos benchmarks. Also winxp had a reg value that was called for versions hklm/sys/windows/CSDVersion might work to pass the check for the spack version
Did you know that the XBOX 360 ran a of highly modified version Windows 2000 made to run on the PowerPC architecture? That’s right! Even the newest version that has the Metro UI inspired by Windows 8 still runs the Windows 2000 software at its core!
@@Toonrick12 I think XP has a slightly newer version of the NT kernel. XP was made for both home and business use. 2000 is made for business and enterprise usage.
*Man puts himself through Windows hell on a G3 Mac so that we don't have to.* Kudos to you for trying it. Is there any way in which you can make NT4 report itself as Service Pack 3 to try to fool the application? Sometimes it's all that's needed.
I've had a lot of success using CD-Rs specifically labelled as "for Music" in really old CD drives. I've got a 72x Kenwood that's really picky, but it's just fine with them. I don't think that "for music" has anything to do with music, per se. It's all digital data after all. I think they discs are formulated to be compatible with the widest possible range of CD players, including the oldest ones, which also makes them more likely to work in older CD ROM drives. I do also burn them at the slowest possible speed as well.
26:00 Michael, on Windows NT 4.0, you configure sound driver (including hardware configuration) settings under "Multimedia". The G3 B/W should have a Crystal Audio compatible chipset, I know drivers exist for the x86 version of NT4, unsure if Microsoft bundles any here - either way, a PCI SB16/AWE32 compatible should have drivers pre-built, again, considering the x86 version of NT4. Worth a try if you have one handy, although, I've zero clue as to what the interrupt configuration for that would be like.
Wow, I never knew about the CD drives on those 2000s macs. I replaced the drives on my imac G3, G4, and G5 systems because I thought I was just really unlucky with drive failures. Maybe I just need a find a different disc to write to!
Your voice is so engaging. Therapeutic! Were you ever a radio station presenter/host? Thanks for the effort to get this working and almost HL! Perhaps there's an SP3 out there that could work?
General rule of thumb: unless the drive supports the format, it won't be able to read the disk. Usually you have to "finalize" RW the burn to make it more compatible with non-RW drives, but even then that's not always successful. And don't get me started on the compatibility issues of CD-R and CD+R...
Partitions over 2 GB will only cause an error the first time. *After restarting the first time, you can leave the partition unchanged, and it will install properly!*
If you need to install on a partition larger than 2GB, you must first format to NTFS type using "Existing Windows NT environment". This strange specification is the same in the PC/AT version.
Man, sometimes I feel nostalgic about the old days, but then I remember all the hours I spent fricking around with countless poorly labelled CD-Rs and rebooting the computer again because you forgot to plug something in. Make coffee while you wait for the machine to boot. Nowadays if I press the button, the computer hardly gives me time to sit down, let alone grab a cup of coffee.
11:50 you didn't spell it wrong, Action Retro had the exact same issue, he had to type it twice as well as you did. He just published a video on the same topic within a couple of minutes of difference
Even if SP3 existed for PPC, it would probably not have worked anyway considering that the emulation libraries wouldn't be updated and would likely be missing certain functions that the emulated game requires.
Yeah, the MIPS support always perplexed me a little. Aside of SGI i think I know of one other maker of MIPS workstations at the time, I guess Microsoft thought they maybe had a chance of making moves into SGI's territory though? not sure.
@@lemagreengreen I think the RISC ports were made because the industry as a whole was afraid that Intel would hit a road-block with their CISC-based x86 processors and wanted an exit strategy. Turns out, the Intel-pocalypse was still 30 years away…
when windows crashes during boot don't forget you can create a bootlog file...it will be called something like bootlog.txt..the machine will be very slow to boot...let the machine crash ..then look at the last line in the file that is the item that most likely caused the BSOD
The reason why the system wouldn't shut down when holding the power button was because the current state of the computer at that time, it wasn't able to even detect the button. I had a similar issue with my old laptop when reinstalling Windows on it, I forgot to delete the EFI partition and when it booted up, it said choose an operating system with no option. It wouldn't shutdown when holding the power button, and I had to let the battery drain out. It's a very rare issue but really annoying. Whenever working on a laptop. PLEASE UNPLUG THE BATTERY!!! Hope this helps!
YEA! Windows NT! the Workstation skew is the most interesting OS to me. mainly it's bootup sound, or was it it's shutdown t's sound? I can't tell cause they are the SAME! That's why it's interesting to me! The startup sound plays fine, but then the shutdown sound is weird. BUT! Put it into the audio player in reverse, you get... the bootup sound? And putting the boot sound in reverse is the shutdown sound! That's clever Microsoft! Also yay. love these videos where something goes wrong.
Funnily, I've been having a lot of IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL lately while trying to play Horizon Zero Dawn on my RX 7600 XT. As far as I am aware it has something to do with memory (VRAM in my case, game can't handle my GPU - works fine on my laptop with a 4060). Might be a GPU driver issue. Might also be an issue with the RAM.
Finally, an MJD video where things go wrong
So just a normal video
lol 🙂
Its normal at this point
🤣🤣🤣
:)
5:42 Hey, that's me! :-D
Yeah, there's still pads for an ADB port and supporting SMD components on the Trayloader board, along with some other leftover legacy I/O (there's a floppy header left unpopulated, which if you solder it in, actually works under earlier versions of Mac OS 8).
That said, it's right behind one of the screwposts for attaching the side panel, which is outside of the actual I/O port opening, so to get around that I had to jankily solder a MiniDIN-4 port to it by wires. It's very ugly, and I don't show it in the pictures for that reason, but it's what I had to do to be able to claim the first NT4 on an iMac G3 install :-P
The fact that the elf files were modified from The Homebrew Channel tickles me something serious. I miss the powerPC era 😢
oh my God I loved the homebrew channel, one of the best times of my damn life
I’ll just note, the Wii uses PowerPC in its CPU.
@@Monitor-t9g Not just any PowerPC CPU, the Wii has basically got a G3
@@Monitor-t9g yeah that's why I was saying I miss it
@@SterkeYerke5555 yeah it's remarkably similar to a souped up iMac basically which I love
Micheal MJD and Action Retro have officially synced! Its Mac-ception!
Imagine if TH-camrs actually collaborated rather than making the same videos at the same time ...
they don't have time or they don't know@@halfsourlizard9319
Yeah i was looking at both in my recommendations wondering if i was seeing things
No joke...I thought they must have collaborated at first but nope...but anyway....if you both watch both channels too, you are both my brothers...I hope you are both doing well! I hope you are both having a great day or night!! Don't do anything I wouldn't do My Brother's!!
@bent-jl6rc I do, and I love both of their content. I mainly watch gamers playing inde games and pc channels like this. We are probably alot more similar than we realize. Have a good night brother. God bless!
Funfact: Rewritable CDs don't use dyes. They use a Phase-Change Material. It works by heating up the Material to around 700°C and when it cools down, it loses its Cristalline Structure and its reflectivity. For deleting the laser heats it up to around 200°C, it returns to its cristalline Structure and becomes reflective again. P
That is so cool!
Huh, so to bulk-erase your discs, just put them in an air fryer on the "Erase CD-RW" setting.
P
@@smartninja3651 It's actually pretty hot.
@@BilisNegra LOL your not wrong there buddy
the text at 0:57 says "ok buddy, I know the Imac G3 isn't a "PowerMac", but I'm just using the term "PowerMac" as shorthand for "PowerPc Mac" so please chill with the semantics"
Pure Micheal MJD gold
Thanks! I tried to read it but I gave up lol
Now I see this comment lol after I did .25 speed pause play on my phone to read it.
Back to the classic "everything goes wrong" videos
Now, let's port Windows NT to the Wii!
I mean, NiNTendo Wii(ndows)
AND the Homebrew Channel ELF files! It's made to be!
The same person (Wack0) has already ported Windows NT to Wii, but decided not to publish their FW and drivers - and port it to Macintosh instead
@@SunnyRayPL Unless if it's some other reason, I think he should. The only way to run Windows on Wii is either DOSBOX (slow as hell on Windows 3.1) or from Linux (QEMU, however there are barely any videos of it plus it's an emulator, not native)
@@afan64 it's an absolutely cursed port running in the wrong endianness with things broken -- the reason I scrapped the port for now is because I also got weird issues with GPU memory corruption on real hardware, and a powerpc mac laptop was cheaper than a usb gecko.
@@betaswithWack0 thats funny, where i live the powerpc mac laptop is WAY more expensive than 60 USD, too many collectors maybe? Everything under 100 USD is marked "missing parts" "no cord/battery" or "*for parts only*"
@@SysOpQueen I got two very lucky auction deals: an iBook G3 Snow on Yahoo Auctions Japan with charger, and a Lombard on eBay with charger, both being sold "for parts only" because of purely software issues. (ok so the lombard has a bad hinge and a line running down the screen, i don't care about that for a dev system)
Currently watching and just paused the video right the moment you succeeded formatting the HDD. Funfact about the Win NT 4.0 Setup: While technically being able to use an 8GB partition to install to (the last sector of that partition has to be within the first 1024 cylinders of the disks geometry), you can only do so by formatting the partition outside of the setup routine with an already running Windows NT system. Because the Windows NT Setup will actually format the partition as FAT16 and therefore is limited to 4GB (because WinNT can actually use a cluster size twice as big as DOS or Win9x). After the first reboot and booting from the hard disk to finish the setup - if you chose to format as NTFS - it will then convert the disk to NTFS. However, partitions originally formatted as NTFS will perform better, than partitions that got converted from FAT to NTFS.
This. A lot of the time, you ended up with a 512 byte cluster size after the conversion completed.
@StringerNews1 "I also got in the habit of making a small FAT boot partition for NT, not unlike the current-day EFI partition, or what NetWare did."
Yes... Actually Intel took the way Microsoft did with their ARC firmware when they designed the first EFI specification, and then was inherited to the open TianoCore/UEFI we have nowadays. And not only that... If we see the similarities and differences, we can tell EFI is just the continuation Microsoft and IBM had done in the RISC space with the ARC specification. Even IBM had a shell firmware in their NT PPC machines resembling DOS, just as today UEFI does.
One of the things PReP/CHRP systems such as the RS/6000 and PowerStack had in common was, unlike most Macs that were filled with ASICs, they used mostly standard chips, specifically the Motorola MPC10x memory controller/PCI bus generator (aka "Grackle"). This chip family was also used in the beige G3, Wallstreet, B&W G3/Yikes! G4, Lombard, and the first few iMacs. The Heathrow multi-function ASIC (ATA, floppy, SCSI, ethernet, etc) was also used in many of these computers (the Wallstreet actually uses two to enable the dual drive bay function), along with its successor Paddington, and they probably didn't have functional drivers for them before now. A fun project, but don't hold out hope you'll see NT running on anything newer (iBooks, Pismo or later, any non-PCI G4, FW iMacs or later) or older systems without a lot of writing drivers for the ASICs (same with onboard sound, though maybe an NT-compatible PCI sound card will work?). I may have to try this on a beige G3. Odd that the github page says it doesn't work out of the box, since the Gossamer board in the beige G3s was the closest to CHRP-compliant hardware that Apple ever built.
Fantastic post, thank you
It says it doesn't work on a Beige G3 at the moment because they don't have New World firmware, which is needed to boot. Without it, they need a custom bootloader. Remember that Linux and BeOS used to start loading Mac OS and then sideload the OS on older Macs.
@@phipli That's true, but they still have OpenFirmware so there should be a way to get it to load. Maybe the OF version is too old for the commands they're running in the current version of the ARC boot loader, or the method to invoke it on OldWorld Macs is non-standard; may need to take inspiration from XPostFacto here. It's possible a later version of the ROM would work OOTB but early revisions may not. I'll play around with it. A beige G3 is really better suited for NT especially since USB is unlikely to ever work properly under NT4 SP2 (it was never officially built into NT4 at any point (see MS KB 196661) which is probably why the USB implementation they tried to use here didn't work). If the floppy drive could be made to work that'd be even better. I'd rather bootstrap from a floppy than a CD, especially since the Mac won't ignore a floppy like it may a CD.
@@fsfs555 Interestingly enough, there WAS some kind of USB implementation for NT4, the SGI320 had one (mostly a backport from win2000) for supporting USB keyboards. I also wrote high-level USB drivers for USB keyboards/mice and mass storage under NT4, which was done when I was porting to the Wii, it's just the low level stuff really that needs to be done, and given that the USB stack in the ARC firmware doesn't work currently, that would need to be fixed first.
@@fsfs555 The floppy drive in a Beige is unlikely to work with NT - Mac floppy drives are very different to PC ones, although the Beige G3 actually was designed to work with both types. The unpopulated PC style floppy connector is partially under the Mac floppy connector on the board. OpenFirmware on beige macs isn't a very tidy implementation - it is sort of the bare minimum to get running and nothing more. On my 6500, if I touch delete it crashes for example. I think... The grackle is an older model compared to the B&W? I haven't gone looking, but I remember there being a part number change to support the 100MHz bus. It would be great if someone sorted a bootloader and tweaked the drivers for support though! I have a Beige G3 set up on the other side of the room right now :) a later model with the Rage II Pro Turbo video chip.
I went through an introductory phase of snagging these older Macs from my dump/transfer station. Most all booted up, many had previous owners info on them. I’d wipe them and bring up to the most current operating system. Mess around with them then give away or bring back to the electronics trailer. Then I bought my first G5 iMac.
that emulation software might actually be ground breaking
i think that with some minimal modding you might be able to run half life on there, maybe if it was possible to offuscate the sp version and make it report sp3
might not work at all, but who knows
okay, now we gotta get someone to compile the SM64 decomp for this specific setup. Just to add to the quirkiness.
no graphics apis so it will have to use software rendering
@@joechristo2 thus adding more to the uniqueness of this build..
the more ridiculous we can make it, the better lol.
Love your videos, they're so comforting for me, keep it up!
I was always curious to try this. Thanks for the video, scratches an itch I have have for over 20 years lol
Great video! I've honestly wondered for a long time if this might be possible. As you mentioned, the type of dye does make a big difference with older machines reading CD-Rs. I've had the best luck with discs that use cyanine dye, which some companies (notably CMC) still make but have become relatively rare today. Also, the developer... I recognize the name "Wack0". This is the same person who was behind the infamous Nintendo data leak among others. I also used to know this person, long before anything like that happened.
I cannot possibly imagine a keyboard without a page down key.
well they definitely exist
What are we supposed to do without it? Use arrowkeys like a damn plebian basic b? No thanks.
@@juh-roon How about Control/Option-down key?
Think Different
What kind of loser pays to have their comment highlighted? This is nasty behaviour.
"Service pack situation is crazy" lmao
@@vardekpetrovic9716 No, the name of one of the chapters in this video is "service pack situation is crazy" which is a reference to a meme about internet drama. I thought it was a funny joke.
Even on x86 systems, you generally want to install NT to a partition no larger than 4 GB, because even when specifying NTFS, it starts out as FAT16 and then converts to NTFS. Workarounds exist to go even higher, but it would likely introduce even more potential problems.
Once installed, the remainder of the drive can generally be used as an extended partition, though it may require certain service packs to do so (i.e. SP4 or higher on IDE drives while SCSI drives might get by on SP1.)
What I do, is make a small partition, just like in own modern UEFI machines, in the first 4GBs and just for the loader part. And the rest of the system is installed in a bigger NTFS formatted partition. These days you can get bootdisks can format to the older NT4 NTFS.
This is pretty dang cool. New World Macs (which use Open Firmware and place the Macintosh Toolbox in RAM) are partially compatible with CHRP, which is itself partially compatible with PReP. That's the PPC hardware standard that NT4 supported. So I'm guessing that this project has filled in the various gaps where New World differs from PReP.
NT actually was compatible and running fine in CHRPs, just not Macintoshes (as SteveJobs shutdown the project, along with the 3rd party cloners and several other things). The Canon/Firepower Powerized series (you can see in the textmode setup list in the video) are complete CHRP machines with OpenFirmware as the boot firmware on them, but instead the Apple sauce bit chips SWIM/PMZ/ADB, them had standard Serial/Parallel/PS2 outputs, a standard PC-style floppy controller and a normal VIA/CUDA chip. Microsoft and Firepower had the code and drivers for the Apple chips ready, but it never came to be.
Old World PCI-based Macs did have Open Firmware, but it was often buggy. And yes, the Open Firmware was in ROM with the Mac Toolbox.
Thanks MJD that info about the discs is going to be so helpful with my current and future old laptops I get
You probably could've tricked half-life into launching by making some registry edits
You and Action Retro did on the same day. Great.
There's something so charming about the carelessness with which he threw the first CD into the tray
This is incredible, and it opens doors to cool things, I see a kernel extender in a few years that increases compatibility to Windows XP levels, as well as improvements to the NTVDM emulator that is used in this version, it will only be a matter of time before see cool things appear.
Dammit Michael! I was trying to be the first one! 🤣 I have like two hours of disaster videos filmed and I still haven’t gotten it to freaking work I’ve been working on it since Monday night 😂
20:20 Funny coincidence, I was picking a file to upload around this time and Firefox seemed to freeze, but I could still hear you being all "Did it hang here? I can still move the mouse"
4:32 I have an old(er) car (2001) and its original stereo also had major trouble reading any burned discs.
33:20 - Thought people might want to know how it's running Doom II - a 32-bit application: it's because x86 versions of the NTVDM simply used the CPUs Virtual 8086 mode, which guaranteed you 8086-level compatibility and nothing more. However, non-x86 NTVDMs had to do full system emulation, so throwing in 386 protected mode support was a cakewalk after writing reams of code to emulate everything from x86 real mode to VGA.
An interesting experiment (if you hacked at the NTVDM to replace its DOS 5.0-like kernel) would be to try to install Windows 95 inside it.
Perfect video to watch at 12:30am ❤
This is a really cool video! Never expected to see Windows NT on PowerPC Macs.
Cleaning the lens in the CD drive can also help get them to read written CDs too btw.
This just proves that even back in 1999, Apple only cared about being proprietary. They could've used the PowerPC standard, but they didn't. I'm still impressed at how much life these old Macs have been given in the last decade.
Swear they went from PowerPC to Intel and it was 100% the right move.
It's worse than you think. Apple was a major contributor to the standard PPC platform, CHRP. But they only partially implemented it in their own products.
Apple did finally embrace the concept of a consistent platform in 1999 with the iBook G3, but it was still their own.
@@cyberturkey77 And then history repeated itself when they downgraded to ARM
@@JustinTire I'm usually very anti-apple but I see the appeal
They can manufacture their own stuff and do it their own way, theoretically allowing for significantly higher performance and/or efficiency
@@JustinTire A lot of articles I've read, and videos I've watched say that the M-series chips perform better than the Intel chips in benchmark tests. I personally feel that the gripe most people have with Apple moving to proprietary silicon is that a lot of applications and many operating systems aren't compatible anymore. Now, I don't know how macOS applications are packaged or distributed, but there are bound to be compatibility issues with certain things when you switch over architectures. You have to take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, of course. I've only read some articles and watched some TH-cam videos, so I don't have all the answers, and I'm probably going to be wrong with a few things. This is just my input on the issue.
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL was the bane of my existence back in the NT4 days. Even on supposedly 100% compatible x86 hardware. Fun times trying to learn programming when every once in a while the computer would bluescreen. But such were the times, we didn't even expect things to actually work.
Michael MJD gotta be the one youtuber I can relate to, as in, we both get problems that no else gets.
nice another MJD video! Right after i had my breakfast, well time to watch it!
also i bet somethings gonna go wrong in this video lol
SP3 is required for Half Life because SP3 is the service pack that adds DirectX to NT4. Half-Life needs DirectX. You can not hack around this limitation. Quake 2 does not require DirectX and would probably work very slowly in this configuration. There will be few other commercial games that would work. DirectX was just so much faster than not using it, there became a point where no one supported a non DirectX fallback anymore.
33:23 You mixed up some stuff here. You can run 16-bit and 32-bit DOS extended applications in emulation. DOOM 1 and 2 are 32-bit applications. You can also run 16-bit _Windows_ mode applications, but not 32-bit Windows mode applications. i.e. DOOM will run, but Doom 95 will not.
Michael MJD, Also the burned CD that is liter color is a thinner layer, I found that a lot of times, not all ways but alot of times if you put a CD LABEL on the disc it reads.
Nice your Windows NT on Mac video posted before Action Retro's vid. Winning 🏆
It’s not a MJD video without things going wrong
When I was a kid every single computer magazine failed me by never saying what “Windows NT” stood for…so judging by the box art I assumed it was “Windows Night Time” since it had stars on the box.
I put windows 10, natively, on my 2012 MacBook Pro as it won’t update the Apple stuff anymore. It runs perfectly. Use it a lot. I love stuff like this, thanks!
Okay, so, thanks for the video. Lots of neat tricks and hints to get this running and good support from other fans of this.
Personally, I never saw the draw of installing Windows SW on Apple HW.
Apple SW on PC HW - that’s a different story.
Each to their own.
Thank you for your video.
a day after the wolrdwide BSOD holiday, Michael goes for NT, ending with more BSOD's. isn't that nice?
Millions of computers at 10-30 minuets each to fix if they weren't not locked with a central bitlocker cache that is also hosed
swapping ADB live is how you fry these old Macs lol
The mouse hold-dragging thing still works on modern computers. It's a legacy that were left from both Microsoft and Apple GUI. And I personally find hold dragging to be more comfortable to use.
I remember probably over 20 years ago I had much more trouble installing this thing on an IBM PC desktop. So this is great!!!!
This is so cool. I wonder why people at the time didn't think about doing this
Wake up, MJD posted
fr🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥💯💯💯
boobs
Im awake 🗣️🗣️ 🔥🔥
Fr
Fr
Always look forward to an MJD vid
I was thinking about this, because I do like playing with older macs and older OSes, and heard there was a PPC version of Windows NT. Awesome to see the community has made it work on these PPC macs.
Oh my pkcell mjd posted WAKE UP!
1:57 huh, it makes sense since the Gamecube/Wii's processor was PowerPC iirc
I love your videos Michael nice video today!
edit:My favourite is windows longhorn build 3706 and prototype build 3660!
I have a smaller keyboard... but I didn't want it too small. I cannot do without full-size cursor keys AND home/end plus page-up/page-down. Holy keys for keyboard navigation commands.
You and ActionRetro got this news at the same time apparently.
My understanding is that the issue with burned CDs on earlier drives is a result of CD-R and CD-RW media having a smaller difference between the reflectivity of the pits and lands. Basically the "burned" parts of a CD-R that were supposed to imitate pits were more reflective than actual pits on a stamped disc, so depending on how an older CD-ROM drive is calibrated it might not be able to read it (And of course different layer dyes affected this as well). Sometimes the drive/device had a potentiometer on it's logic board which controlled the edge voltage coming from the photodiode used to decode the pits and lands, this could sometimes be adjusted to allow the device to read other media. The speed you burn a disc also has zero effect on this. The common advice to use lower speeds is from the advice surrounding making sure the burn is successful, as early on systems might have trouble keeping the write buffer full- if it emptied out then the burn would fail, and of course slower speeds meant that the system had to do less work to keep it full and thus more likely to have a successful burn.
lower writing speeds gurantee more refelctivity
Oh, unreadable Verbatim discs in old systems. I remember how I'm bought an around 10 quite expensive Verbatim DVD-R discs in jewel box each back than, burn some PS2 backups on them and couldn't read any of them afterwards. Fun fact that after I tossed all of them and bought literally the cheapest random no-name DVD-R discs from local random shop, burned images again and they still work after so much years. :')
MJD: "I just like keep things simple as possible" That makes my day
0:40 The address there is an IBM building in Austin at the Domain... and I was nearby this past weekend!
IRQL error is usually a bad driver. It should have written something more specific to a logfile. Or in this case, a lolfile.
My G4 had a DVD-RAM drive, it too can only read Select Disks, and cannot read burned or DVD disks, of any dye, and is limited to 2.4GB. Replaced with a normal DVD drive to stop the swearing.
Another great, informative and entertaining video MJD!
Me listening to the video while doing dishes and cleaning the house: _wow, it almost turned into a "and everything went wrong" video_
NT 4 was a strange beast. IIRC, before SP 4, you couldn't create a partition during setup that was larger than 2GB because... it formatting it initially as FAT16 and then automatically converted it to NTFS near the end of setup.....
Yeah. That never made sense to me. The installer wasn't capable of loading an NTFS driver? It could load hardware drivers... what the actual...
Absolutely fantastic. Always enjoyable
Ohhh run the full dos benchmarks.
Also winxp had a reg value that was called for versions hklm/sys/windows/CSDVersion might work to pass the check for the spack version
Did you know that the XBOX 360 ran a of highly modified version Windows 2000 made to run on the PowerPC architecture? That’s right! Even the newest version that has the Metro UI inspired by Windows 8 still runs the Windows 2000 software at its core!
Isn't Windows XP just a version of 2000?
@@Toonrick12 I think XP has a slightly newer version of the NT kernel. XP was made for both home and business use. 2000 is made for business and enterprise usage.
when I saw someone posted about this on twitter one of my first thoughts was "I wonder when MJD is gonna make a video about this"
29:00 “My god, Gordon? Is that really you”
*Man puts himself through Windows hell on a G3 Mac so that we don't have to.*
Kudos to you for trying it. Is there any way in which you can make NT4 report itself as Service Pack 3 to try to fool the application? Sometimes it's all that's needed.
I've had a lot of success using CD-Rs specifically labelled as "for Music" in really old CD drives. I've got a 72x Kenwood that's really picky, but it's just fine with them. I don't think that "for music" has anything to do with music, per se. It's all digital data after all. I think they discs are formulated to be compatible with the widest possible range of CD players, including the oldest ones, which also makes them more likely to work in older CD ROM drives. I do also burn them at the slowest possible speed as well.
I remember the Homebrew channel. Had a fun music spaceship game on it.
26:00 Michael, on Windows NT 4.0, you configure sound driver (including hardware configuration) settings under "Multimedia". The G3 B/W should have a Crystal Audio compatible chipset, I know drivers exist for the x86 version of NT4, unsure if Microsoft bundles any here - either way, a PCI SB16/AWE32 compatible should have drivers pre-built, again, considering the x86 version of NT4. Worth a try if you have one handy, although, I've zero clue as to what the interrupt configuration for that would be like.
Wow, I never knew about the CD drives on those 2000s macs. I replaced the drives on my imac G3, G4, and G5 systems because I thought I was just really unlucky with drive failures. Maybe I just need a find a different disc to write to!
Your voice is so engaging. Therapeutic! Were you ever a radio station presenter/host? Thanks for the effort to get this working and almost HL! Perhaps there's an SP3 out there that could work?
New title: “Installing Windows NT on a PowerPC Mac, but Everything Goes Wrong”
“The Homerbrew Channel” made laugh soo hard😂😂😂
General rule of thumb: unless the drive supports the format, it won't be able to read the disk. Usually you have to "finalize" RW the burn to make it more compatible with non-RW drives, but even then that's not always successful. And don't get me started on the compatibility issues of CD-R and CD+R...
cd+r is not a thing, it ws only present on dvd+r
I'm sad you didn't use the CRT monitor for the video. There's something special about those CRT All in one computers that I just love looking at.
Partitions over 2 GB will only cause an error the first time. *After restarting the first time, you can leave the partition unchanged, and it will install properly!*
If you need to install on a partition larger than 2GB, you must first format to NTFS type using "Existing Windows NT environment".
This strange specification is the same in the PC/AT version.
Time to port Doom and Quake to PowerPC Windows!
This is exactly how I remember NT 4.0
Man, sometimes I feel nostalgic about the old days, but then I remember all the hours I spent fricking around with countless poorly labelled CD-Rs and rebooting the computer again because you forgot to plug something in. Make coffee while you wait for the machine to boot. Nowadays if I press the button, the computer hardly gives me time to sit down, let alone grab a cup of coffee.
Babe wake up Michael MJD posted
11:50 you didn't spell it wrong, Action Retro had the exact same issue, he had to type it twice as well as you did. He just published a video on the same topic within a couple of minutes of difference
Even if SP3 existed for PPC, it would probably not have worked anyway considering that the emulation libraries wouldn't be updated and would likely be missing certain functions that the emulated game requires.
Windows NT4 SP2 was the final one to include the PowerPCs
now this is real shit
Many talk about Hackintoshing on x86 Macs, but this is something I’ve always wondered about.
NT 4.0 is the last version to suppprt DEC Alpha & MIPS processor. I honestly thought that those processor was unique.
Yeah, the MIPS support always perplexed me a little. Aside of SGI i think I know of one other maker of MIPS workstations at the time, I guess Microsoft thought they maybe had a chance of making moves into SGI's territory though? not sure.
@@lemagreengreen I think the RISC ports were made because the industry as a whole was afraid that Intel would hit a road-block with their CISC-based x86 processors and wanted an exit strategy.
Turns out, the Intel-pocalypse was still 30 years away…
Looking forward for OS/2 for Power PC 😁
when windows crashes during boot don't forget you can create a bootlog file...it will be called something like bootlog.txt..the machine will be very slow to boot...let the machine crash ..then look at the last line in the file that is the item that most likely caused the BSOD
The reason why the system wouldn't shut down when holding the power button was because the current state of the computer at that time, it wasn't able to even detect the button. I had a similar issue with my old laptop when reinstalling Windows on it, I forgot to delete the EFI partition and when it booted up, it said choose an operating system with no option. It wouldn't shutdown when holding the power button, and I had to let the battery drain out. It's a very rare issue but really annoying. Whenever working on a laptop. PLEASE UNPLUG THE BATTERY!!! Hope this helps!
my cat is enjoying this so much that he's stopping me from watching... he's sitting in front of my tv
YEA! Windows NT! the Workstation skew is the most interesting OS to me. mainly it's bootup sound, or was it it's shutdown t's sound? I can't tell cause they are the SAME! That's why it's interesting to me! The startup sound plays fine, but then the shutdown sound is weird. BUT! Put it into the audio player in reverse, you get... the bootup sound? And putting the boot sound in reverse is the shutdown sound! That's clever Microsoft! Also yay. love these videos where something goes wrong.
Your Mac has PCI slots. Install some Windows-supported sound and graphics cards that have Windows NT 4.0 PPC drivers included in the Windows install.
Funnily, I've been having a lot of IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL lately while trying to play Horizon Zero Dawn on my RX 7600 XT. As far as I am aware it has something to do with memory (VRAM in my case, game can't handle my GPU - works fine on my laptop with a 4060). Might be a GPU driver issue. Might also be an issue with the RAM.
27:37 i suspect that `dac960nt` might be a sound device where DAC stands for digital analog converter.
This is amazing honestly.